Its childs play, again, for MJ

Some years
ago, I was in Las Vegas covering a boxing match, and staying in a hotel
off that city's Strip. The morning before the fight, leaving on my reporting
rounds, I passed a tennis court where Sugar Ray Leonard, who'd just
retired from boxing and was on hand as a television commentator, was
hitting balls. I returned more than five hours later to find him still
whacking away.

I recall thinking that Leonard must be seriously bored, so I wasn't
surprised when, a month or so later, he said he was returning to the
ring. Even a detached retina that threatened the vision in one of his
eyes couldn't deter him from going back to the one activity that gave
him satisfying occupation.

Now, also seemingly out of boredom and against the dictates of good
sense, Michael Jordan has said that he's returning to the National Basketball
Association wars at age 38 after a three-year retirement, his second,
by the way. The run-up to the announcement was pure Jordan, a will-he-or-won't-he
drama whose layers unpeeled onion-like and put him in the spotlight
for a good six months. The guy's a better stripper than Blaze Starr
in her prime.

If ever there was a good news-bad news situation, this is it. The good
news, of course, will come from the pleasure people will get from being
able to see basketball's greatest player perform again under any circumstances,
the box-office and TV-ratings lifts his presence will bring to his league,
and the sales boosts it will afford companies that pay him handsomely
to say "cheese" while holding up their products.

The most obvious bad-news potential lies in the diminished skills and
increased susceptibility to injury that almost certainly will result
from Jordan's advanced years. Idols step from their pedestals at their
risk, and at ours.

But worse, I think, is the disappointment one feels at the thought
that all that this transcendent athlete can think of doing as middle
age envelops him is the same thing he did as a kid. He must know that
whatever he accomplishes in his latest comeback isn't likely to top
the championship rings, Olympic gold medals and scoring and MVP trophies
he's already amassed.

Further, satisfying his antsy nature meant walking out on the challenge
he accepted when he became a part owner and basketball honcho of the
Washington Wizards, the team he'll now play for. His 20 months in that
outfit's front office did little to improve its woebegone status. He
hired one coach only to fire him and hire another, and pared veterans
from the roster without replacing them in kind. The team could improve
with free agents next season, but the league's 1999 labor contract made
team-hopping less attractive than it was before, and it remains to be
seen if young stars whose present contracts are due to lapse would relish
an indefinite term as second banana to MJ with the Wiz.

You can't help but contrast Jordan's post-basketball life with that
of Earvin "Magic" Johnson, the ex-Los Angeles Laker great. He left the
game in 1991 after being diagnosed as HIV-positive at age 32, yet despite
the burden of that condition, and without Jordan's endorsement lode,
he's become an imaginative, successful and community-minded businessman.
Yes, Johnson did scratch his basketball itch by nipping back into the
NBA as both a coach and a player, but those brief hitches served mainly
to remind them that he'd been there and done that, and it was time to
move on.

Jordan says he's returning "for love of the game," but he could use
his wealth and immense celebrity to express that love by being a worldwide
ambassador for the sport, or for any other cause he chooses. He might
get around to that eventually. First, though, he'll have to bounce a
basketball several thousand times more.